Generally, as organizations are growing larger, especially across teams and geographies, it is often the case that different people put in requests for similar resources and information at different points of time. While resource requests can include those relating to printer or copier use (among other things), even information requests also ultimately represent a form of resource requests (e.g., in that every keyword search takes up bandwidth).
Outside of costs, it is often the case that resource requests also carry environmental implications, e.g., in the case of printing the same document by multiple people. Thus, a lack of appreciation of context usually results in similar or duplicate resource requests needlessly being made. However, it is normally infeasible for everyone in an organization (or portion thereof) to have access to direct knowledge of everything that their peers might be requesting.